The ASRock Z270 Pro4 in Detail

The ASRock Z270 Pro4 is a very well-featured ATX motherboard with Intel's Z270 chipset offering
compatibility with Intel's processors from the 6000 and 7000 series. This black-themed board comes with
two PCIe x16 slots, of which one comes with a full 17 lanes connected to the chipset, while the
other PCIe x16 slot is connected electrically via four data links. For I/O and expansion cards the board
provides three PCIe x1 slots and supports AMD's CrossFireX technology.

The motherboard provides DDR4 RAM compatibility over 4 DIMM slots in ultra-fast dual-channel mode.
The memory banks take up to 64 GB RAM and, depending on the processor installed, supports memory
clocks of either 2.133 MHz (with Skylake CPUs) or 2.400 MHz (with Kaby Lake CPUs), while
overclocking allows memory modules of up to 3.733 MHz to be used.

In order to connect the very fastest data storage devices, the board comes with two M.2 slots for extreme
NVMe M.2 SSDs, as well as six SATA 6G ports for 3,5" or 2,5" hard drives and SSDs (including RAID
support). The M.2 ports are connected via four PCIe lanes on the 3.0 standard to the chipset and, in
combination with the NVMe protocol, enable a data transfer rate of almost 4 GB/s. This allows M.2 PCIe
SSDs to function up to eight times faster than SATA 6G SSDs!

The motherboard's I/O panel offers a new kind of USB port, USB Type C, which is particularly thin and
is finally able to be plugged in both ways. Besides the Type C port the motherboard comes with, the
motherboard also provides five additional backwards compatible USB 3.0 Type A ports. If no graphics
card is available, then thanks to the integrated GPU of Skylake or Kaby Lake CPUs, monitors can be
connected directly to the rear of the motherboard. HDMI, D-Sub (VGA) and DVI-D ports are provided
for this purpose.

Internally the motherboard offers - among other functions - TPM and COM ports, Chassis Intrusion
detection, Power LED and speaker headers as well as a 4-pin CPU FAN connector, two 4-pin headers for
PWM fans, a 4-pin pump header, a front panel audio connector and two Thunderbolt AIC connectors.